Tuesday Nov 30, 2010

I am very pleased to announce that we've signed up our first partner to the Oracle Validated Integration program for Oracle Grid Engine. Jaryba's SmartSuspend product is a clever way to allow jobs suspended by Grid Engine to release all of the resources they're holding, even memory and FLEXlm licenses. And it works without requiring any changes to the applications. You don't even have to recompile.

If you've ever run into the issue of running out of swap space because of preempted jobs holding onto their memory, SmartSuspend might be the answer you're looking for. It works by inserting itself between the application and the OS so that it can track the memory and license usage. When a job is suspended, SmartSuspend first uses its knowledge of the resources requested by the application to let all of those resources go. When the job is resumed, SmartSuspend first attempts to recapture those resources before allowing the application to run. From the application's perspective, nothing changes. From the administrator's perspective, the difference is huge.

Friday Nov 12, 2010

After much internal... discussion, Oracle has decided to have a booth at SC10 after all, and as usual, I will be there waving the Grid Engine banner. If you're at the show, please come by and say high. I believe they've scheduled some office hours of sorts for me on Tuesday afternoon, but I should be hanging around the Oracle booth for most of the show. (Except Thursday, so don't wait until the last minute!) I think I'll also be making an appearance at the Univa UD booth on Tuesday morning at 11:00.

I also want to mention the RCE Podcast Brock Palen and Jeff Squyers were kind enough to invite me to record. If you're interested in an intro to OGE or a high level status check, go have a listen.

I guess since I have your attention, I should also point out that the presentation I did at Oracle OpenWorld '10 about using Grid Engine for large-scale data-oriented computing (e.g. Hadoop) with Tom White from Cloudera is now available on the Grid Engine OTN page.